Le meraviglie di Aladino—The Wonders of Aladdin


Kairouan’s Foire du Tapis Palace— renowned for hosting an annual exhibition of hand-woven carpets and rugs—into a Baghdad market place as long as a city block. The ambitious set reportedly included a fully appointed bath house (where Djalma works for her father) and fourteen different shops. Mogherini did his usual magnifi- cent job on this production, giving the film a marvelously Byzantine look, and providing a wonderfully spooky and atmospheric lair for Raymond Bussières’ evil magician.


Special Effects


Donald O’Connor, Vittorio De Sica, and Noëlle Adam accidentally crossed the border into Algeria during a desert scene, causing them and other crew members to be detained for three un- pleasant hours by Algerian frontier troops. On another day, shooting was disrupted by a medium-sized earth- quake. While participating in an ac- tion sequence, O’Connor ruptured a blood vessel in his throat, putting him temporarily out of action. But the production’s most har-


rowing situation arose when the company was granted permission by


2 One of the greater sources of confusion for those of us who chronicle the field of popular Italian cinema is the presence of two Franco Prosperis on the scene. Bava’s assistant director, Francesco “Franco” Prosperi, who was also a screenwriter and later became a direc- tor in his own right, should not be mistaken for the Franco E. Prosperi who co-directed Mondo Cane (1962), Africa addio (1966), Addio zio Tom (1971), and other so-called “mondo movies” with Gualtiero Jacopetti. The Prosperi who worked with Bava later directed such films as Tecnica di un omicidio/Hired Killer (1966), Dick Smart 2.007 (1967), La settima donna/ Terror (1978) and Il trono di fuoco/Throne of Fire (1982), sometimes using the pseudonyms “Frank Shannon” and “Charles Price.”


3 Manlio Gomarasca and Davide Pulici, “Il Talento


di Mr. Bava,” Nocturno Dossier 24, July 2004, 6–32. 4 Variety, January 25, 1961, 11. 5 Ornella Volta, “Conversation avec Mario Bava,”


Positif 138, May 1972, 44–48.


Governor Amor Chachia to film inside the sacred, 1300-year-old Grand Mosque of Kairouan at the end of January. To photograph the interior of this sacred temple, to bring food and drink inside this spiritual place, which was also forbidden to women— all of these innocent transgressions were regarded as a desecration by Muslim leader Grand Mufti Abder- rahim Khalil, who loudly protested the filming and was placed under ar- rest by the Governor for inciting a riot. The film’s American pressbook politely described the resulting fra- cas as “a minor Muslim revolution.” According to Variety, after the Grand Mufti’s arrest, “an angry mob of [Muslims] broke into [the Governor’s] palace, killed one of his guards, then overturned and burned ambulances, trucks, and cars as Tunisian troops rushed to the scene, opened fire on them, killing four civilians.” The story might have been contained, but the film’s publicist Harvey Matofsky promptly phoned the story to the As- sociated Press and United Press In- ternational, for which he was per- sonally threatened with arrest and promptly banished from the city by the Governor. 4


ALADDIN pleads with his lamp for one more wish. Note the bed’s ornate headboard, which figures in many other Bava films.


No members of the cast or crew


were injured, but ten years later, in an interview with Ornella Volta, Mario Bava looked back on this inci- dent as the one time in his life when he was most truly afraid. “We had in- vaded the Grand Mosque in Kairouan with a full crew—cameras, lights, el- ephants, makeup kits, ham sand- wiches—everything that makes Mus- lims upset! Suddenly, I found myself on the ground with fifty furious Ar- abs standing above me, all armed with spears! Fifty spears—pointed at me! They were the procession for a scene we were supposed to have filmed, which was subsequently scrapped. Those Arabs were sup- posed to have flung themselves into a fire in the scene we were going to shoot, and they demanded to be paid whether we filmed it or not, because of the terror they had all suffered from imagining it!” 5


On the positive side, art direc- tor Flavio Mogherini worked won- ders on location, transforming


The “wonders” of The Wonders of Aladdin were the doing of Mario Bava and Carlo Rambaldi. Accord- ing to Marcello Gatti, Bava’s spe- cial effects duties were not limited to the obvious. Especially after the Grand Mosque incident, the film company was limited in its scenic options—but if Mario could not be taken to the required scenery, the scenery would come to Mario. “Bava was an absolute genius,” says Gatti. “When we were making the movie, he bought a lot of tour- ist postcards—you know, the typi- cal local landscapes—and he spent an entire evening cutting up these postcards with a small scissors. We all wondered what the hell was he trying to do! Then he glued all the pieces on various panes of glass, creating a series of perfect mattes that perfectly matched shots we had scheduled, providing wonder- ful backgrounds and landscapes! He put a mirror at a certain angle to the camera and told me how to shoot the mirror. I had an actress that was standing at a completely different angle to the camera, but she was somehow projected into the midst of another incredibly pre- pared background! Yes, that’s how it was—I would follow his instruc- tions and try to figure out what he was doing, but I was never really able to anticipate him. I just waited for the dailies to see what the hell we had really shot!” To suggest the limbo experi- enced by Aladdin as his wishes transport him from one place to an- other, Bava employed a water tank.


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